Besting the tract home : a software-based bricolage approach to affordable custom housing

Tract housing has earned its position as the overwhelmingly dominant paradigm of home building and ownership in America because it's such an efficient and therefore cost-effective system. Custom-designed housing has provable benefits over a one size-fits-all approach, but has remained unreachable for the vast majority of home buyers (or at the very least not worth it) due to the price/time/hassle disadvantage of its inefficient production systems. In attempting to make customized housing competitive with the tract home on a price/time/hassle graph, this thesis searches for efficiency through using bricolage; nonstandard, ambiguous components; the principles of object-oriented programming; and the consumer-centric standard practices of e-commerce. A paradigm and accompanying software are created to allow a custom house to be designed in hours rather than months, enabling architects to design by arranging pre-designed multi-room components, as selected from a searchable database, into a single structure that uniquely fits a client's needs. Sample houses are designed and economic estimates are made to gauge the potential competitiveness of such a system with tract housing, as well as the system's potential effect on the overall economy of architecture.

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dept. of Architecture.

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2008

Author dc:creator

• Plewe, Thomas Clayton

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Terry Knight.

• Architecture.

Statement dc:rights

• M.I.T. theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed from this source for any purpose, but reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission. See provided URL for inquiries about permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/47897

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/47897